NINETEEN

A BIG BIRTHDAY

1980 – 1985

“Art was not my most difficult subject. Life was my most difficult subject.”

—Louise Nevelson to Hunter Drohojowska, “At 85, Louise Nevelson Gets Her Day in the L.A. Sun,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June 24, 1985

It could be said that 1980 was the year of “The Nevelson”—a busy, bustling eightieth birthday celebration for her and her work. The Municipal Art Society in New York City turned a fund-raising dinner into a birthday party.¹ Mayor Ed Koch gave her a cake with candles, which she refused to blow out, fearing bad luck.

Far from slowing down as she aged, Nevelson was speeding up as though the awareness of time passing propelled her into ever more productive, adventurous activity. Her work grew in size and scale and the media she used became more varied. Her realization of the shortness of time remaining to fulfill her long-held ambitions seemed to have eliminated whatever remaining inhibitions had held her back before.

Nevelson was now putting everything else aside in order to focus on her work. Though her work had almost always been the central and most compelling aspect of her life, the large volume of both work and exhibitions during her last years was remarkable.

January 1980 began with a travelling exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum titled Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension. Almost all the works in the show were on loan from Pace Gallery, and many represented phases of her career that were rarely seen. The catalogue essay placed the fourth dimension in the theatrical context she had learned about in the 1920s from Norina Matchabelli and Frederick Kiesler—and only hints at the metaphysical aspects.² The artist’s spiritual inclinations were still not much on public display.

For the next few months Nevelson moved into high gear, preparing for three simultaneous solo shows in New York—at Pace Gallery, at Wildenstein & Co. Gallery,³ and a big retrospective at the Whitney—as well as another show of her collages in Chicago at the Gray Gallery. Also on the calendar was the installation of a large steel sculpture at Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street along with any number of art-world social events celebrating her eightieth year.

In a statement Nevelson wrote for the 1980 Whitney exhibition catalogue (but which was not included in the final version), she describes her thoughts and feelings about her aging:

I am 80 years old. I’ve worked very physically all my life. It never dawned on me that there was another way of life. I did what I did and got hooked on it. I could tell you a lot of things that were unfair in the art world. But when you get to be 80, you reach a plateau of maturity. People are so reverential. They say, “I’ve always admired your work.” Well I know that isn’t always true. Sometimes I wish they would just say, “Thank you for doing the work.”⁴

All reviews of the 1980 shows focus on the same matters: Nevelson’s energy and individuality, as well as her continuing ability to grow and create new work which looked fresh and original.

The Whitney exhibition, honoring her eightieth year and the Whitney’s fiftieth year, opened on May 27, 1980. It was entitled Atmospheres and Environments and consisted of five environments assembled from work still in existence, with some new works added to fill in missing elements: Royal Voyage (1956) and Moon Garden + One (1958) (both originally from Colette Roberts’s Grand Central Moderns Gallery); the all-white Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959–60) (originally seen at MoMA); in the gold room, The Royal Tides (1961) (originally at the Martha Jackson Gallery); and the room-size, all-black Mrs. N’s Palace (1977) (originally at Pace Gallery).

For some viewers the entire show was too much, but for Robert Hughes of Time magazine, Moon Garden + One represented “the full mastery of effect with which Nevelson could and still can, transform a given space. These columns and stacks of boxes with their carefully orchestrated suggestions of altarpiece, shrine, cave and iconostasis, suggest how far her desire for an environmental art has transcended decoration…. All this could be melodramatic, without Nevelson’s clear sense of formal diction. She knows exactly how far a space can be loaded with shapes before congestion takes over.”⁵

Most reviewers noted that Nevelson managed to combine Cubism and Surrealism with a bit of Abstract Expressionism. Hughes made a coherent story of that trajectory: “Part of the achievement of her work lies in the way in which she adapted the rationale of cubist composition to more mysterious ends…. The encompassing ambition of Nevelson’s work is to make a continuous surface so full, so engrossing and so minutely articulated with variety of detail that it can work as an abstract metaphor of nature itself.”

Richard Roud, a reviewer for The Guardian, acknowledges Nevelson as “a great artist in the American vein of the isolated eccentric…. [Like Herman Melville,] she stands superbly and dangerously alone, unique out of an historical void…. Mrs. N does not belong to any school or movement. She is her own woman.”⁶

Master wordsmith, distinguished playwright, and longtime friend of Nevelson, Edward Albee wrote the introductory essay for the Whitney catalogue. In this, his first public essay on Louise Nevelson, Albee addresses what he saw as a serious problem for Nevelson the artist, namely, that “the fame of her persona overshadows that of her work in the general public’s mind.” In the previous chapter, on the artist’s persona, Albee’s contention was considered in detail. For the catalogue essay of the Whitney show he noted that, “The very best of Nevelson’s individual assemblages, or structures, or sculptures … are, variously, exquisite, powerful, remote, primordial, and always intellectually stimulating,” Like other perceptive critics he compared these works to Bach: “They do things to the mind akin to what a Bach two- or three-part invention does.”⁷

Albee ends his essay with what becomes a headline, “The world is beginning to resemble her art”: “Nevelson feels that she began making her ‘worlds’ as an alternative space, so to speak—to create for herself a fathomable reality in the midst of the outside chaos. What has happened, of course, is that the private has become public, the refuge accessible to all, and, to those who know what a Nevelson looks like, the world is beginning to resemble her art. I hope she’s pleased.”⁸

Albee is here referring to the phenomenon of Nevelson’s transition from being a little-known but respected artist in the 1950s, whose creation of imagined worlds in wood surrounded the viewer, to her becoming one of America’s most important sculptors, whose large-scale sculpture in public places and many museum retrospectives reached a broad audience. He touches upon a little understood but central fact about the artist. To many it looked like her avid search for a wide audience was motivated simply by a wish for fame. In fact, her deepest desire was to share her creativity with the world and to encourage everyone to participate in what she believed was the highest possible human achievement—art. As Nevelson understood it, art was something that should be accessible to all—not just an elite few.

In late 1979, after several years of failing health, Nate Berliawsky was diagnosed with colon cancer, and Nevelson arranged to have him admitted to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. With treatment, his cancer went into remission, but he died of heart failure in September of 1980.⁹

Nate Berliawsky had not only financially supported his sister for almost thirty years, he had done everything in his power to promote her work. He hung his hotel dining room with her early paintings, filled the lobby with one of her premier wall sculptures and, through his good relationship with Marius Péladeau, the new director of the Farnsworth Museum, he paved the way for her triumphant return to Rockland. Nate left his entire art collection, which included twenty-two Nevelsons, to the Farnsworth Museum. It is still unclear how much he had deprived himself over the decades to keep her solvent. Nevelson loved her brother and remained close to him throughout his life. Whenever he was in New York, she included him in the intimate social events with her close friends. His was the only family funeral Louise Nevelson ever attended.

For her big birthday year, 1980, Nevelson had been in twelve group shows, had four solo exhibitions, and had installed two very large metal sculptures; one in New York, the other in Kansas City. Between the beginning of 1981 and the end of 1985 she participated in twenty group shows and twenty solo shows, and seven of her large-scale public works were installed around the country. That is to say, from age eighty to eighty-six she had hardly slowed down at all. Most of the solo shows were at the five galleries which had represented her for some time: Pace New York, Pace Columbus, Makler in Philadelphia, Richard Gray in Chicago, and Hokin in Florida.

She was awarded a few more honorary doctorates from even more prestigious institutions than before, including Harvard College, and she gave an invited lecture at Yale University. Special honors included the Gold Medal Award for Sculpture by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 and, in 1985, President Reagan gave her the National Medal of Arts, which had been awarded by the U.S. Congress.

Sometimes she needed to rush from one event to another, but that was no big hardship for this always energetic artist. I shall highlight some of these events and introduce the few novelties among the regular round of Nevelson’s usual working life and celebrations of her success.

In October 1981, Glimcher accompanied Nevelson to Paris for a retrospective at the stylish Galerie de France, which had just moved to a new space next to the Pompidou Center. The show was a financial and critical success. Ann Cremin, writing for The Irish Times, noted that the indefatigable artist “stood for more than three hours receiving homage and looking like an old-time Hollywood film star, in amazing eye make-up and [a] bright-blue fox coat to the floor.” Cremin also deems the works magnificent, noting especially “a stunning monumental wood wall, North Floral,” and “a monumental black steel sculpture, Celebration, which is both intense and yet seems to float along.”¹⁰

In the International Herald Tribune, Esther Garcia paints the usual picture of the artist in full plumage:

At a reception for her, she makes a spectacular entrance, with her 81 years, her eyelashes and a black sequined dress. She is immediately surrounded. She tells about a dinner the night before at the house of a great family of Parisian art dealers…. “The house was exquisite and formal. You could die just for the carpets. Everything was reverence for art and the artist. Very nice, but I had to break the spell. They offered me a cigarette. I told them, I don’t smoke. I don’t smoke any more, I don’t drink any more and I don’t even freelance any more.”¹¹

Something serious had happened. No cigarillos, no alcohol, and no more sex. Though Nevelson was still trying to avoid aging, she was finally aware that if she wanted to keep on at her accustomed pace she would have to limit herself and restrict some of her previous pleasures.

Some people as they age are themselves but more so. For most of her life Nevelson had been outspoken and future oriented. In November 1981, Nevelson went to Westbrook College in Portland, Maine, to accept the college’s highest honor—the Deborah Morton Award—given to “outstanding women who have achieved high distinction in their careers.” She was acutely aware of the importance of candidly speaking her mind and passing along her accumulated wisdom to young people, especially young women. In his write-up of the event in Maine for the Portland Press Herald, reporter Bill Caldwell noted that, “It was Nevelson the woman who stole the show.” Her words mesmerized the students: “Be careful about the path you choose for yourself now,” she warned the art students, “for what we select in our youth is what we will be when we’re older…. It doesn’t matter what avenue you choose, so long as it is you who does the choosing. Doing that is your true heritage.”¹² Nevelson knew full well about the dangers of following either convention or the advice of someone other than her own self. She had paid a big price for her youthful mistakes, and in her old age she was generously trying to advise younger women.

The veteran reporter was as bewitched by her as were the students. Caldwell ended the piece: “I sat with her for an unforgettable hour at lunch in Westbrook College last week. At 82, she is not only a headliner, but one of the most fascinating and sexy women alive.”¹³

Four months later Nevelson was honored by the Manhattan Women’s Division of State of Israel Bonds for her contributions to the art world and her support of the Israel Bond program.¹⁴ This particular distinction was special for her, and at the awards ceremony she spoke more candidly than usual about her feelings as a Jew. “The Jewish people didn’t have a home for 2,000 years. That is why Israel is important…. [My family] came to the United States in 1905 because of pogroms, I am sympathetic to people who get beat up.”¹⁵ The fact that Nevelson was eighty-one before she publically mentioned the violent events that had sent her family to the New World suggests how deeply buried those early traumata had been. It may also indicate that from the perspective of her advanced age she felt secure enough to look back at her early life and recall some of the fear and horror. Her support of Israel was another instance of her endorsement of the future, especially for people who had been or could be in danger.

In 1982 and 1983 Nevelson created Dawn Shadows, a large work (thirty-one feet high, weighing thirty-five thousand tons) in Cor-Ten steel to be placed in front of Madison Plaza, a new office building in Chicago designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.¹⁶ Nevelson’s sculpture was based on a maquette (eight feet six inches by six feet by five feet six inches), which had originally been called Dawn Tree and shown at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase. It was the fifth of the six very large public sculptures she would design to fit into a particular architectural framework. Earlier ones include Sky Covenant in Boston (1973), Sky Tree in San Francisco (1977), Shadows and Flags in New York City (1978), and Bendix Trilogy in Southfield, Michigan (1979).

Nevelson was jubilant when Dawn Shadows, which she referred to as “my trees,”¹⁷ was unveiled on May 19, 1983, to the music of Ottorino Respighi, and she pulled the ripcord which released several thousand black and white balloons. “I hope to plant more trees in Chicago,”¹⁸ she said laughing.

She had intended Dawn Shadows, like Shadows and Flags in New York City, as well as Sky Tree in San Francisco, to be seen both from above—in this case, from the nearby rapid-transit platform, as well as the forty-five-story Madison Plaza—or from below, on the built-in seating at the base. According to the Chicago Tribune art critic, Alan Artner, both views “emphasize a spectacular relation to the mirrored skin of the building, suggesting that this is a piece not to be looked at as much as through.”¹⁹ Once again we see Nevelson aiming to communicate through her art with the largest possible number of ordinary people—the secretaries and workers in the offices on high floors, the riders of the rapid transit, and anyone resting on the seats at the base of the sculpture. She was fulfilling her vision as an architectural sculptor.

In October of 1982 Nevelson travelled with Diana MacKown to Japan for her solo show in the grand gallery of the Wildenstein gallery in Tokyo.²⁰ Particularly appealing to the Japanese were the artist’s elegant abstractions in wood and on paper and the fact that, though the show was described as a retrospective, it also included recent works. L’Oeil, a prestigious French art journal, reviewed the exhibition respectfully and noted that, in addition to her work in wood, she was also producing large-scale steel sculptures for urban settings.²¹ No doubt the information that an artist in her eighties was continuing to create important work in different media appealed to a culture where the elderly are revered.

Shortly after her return from Japan, in November 1982, Art News published a feature article on success in the art world. Nevelson offered up a long statement of her complex views on the subject. “Success? It’s such a dreary word…. Isn’t it too bad that in America success always must be measured by your income tax? As far as I’m concerned I was a success when I first exhibited in a group show in 1932. I’ve lived through a lot of bumpy times since then, but who in this absurd world of ours becomes an artist with the expectation of making money? Only the naïve. To survive, most need a job or private income or a rich lover or husband, or something.” In her case that “something” had been a supportive family, which kept her afloat for thirty years.

“Certainly I’ve had depressions and I’ve been analyzed—not too deeply—but my terra firma lies within me, which is why I study oriental philosophy. An artist, to a degree, can make what he wants of his life, even with very little money. If you can do that, then you are truly successful.”²² In essence this is the same message she gave to the young women graduates at Westbrook. External success is fine but never as important as finding one’s own identity and making what one wants of life. In many ways her goals never changed and rarely did her means of reaching them.

In mid-January 1983 Nevelson had a solo show at Pace Gallery, Louise Nevelson: Cascades Perpendiculars Silence Music. That she was working with the charred remains of a church was less notable to the critics than the fact that she was still working at all and could be described as one of our better older artists.²³ Some of the first listings for the show did not mention its title. Instead the following notice was placed in The New York Times: “Sculptures made from remnants of the church organ of St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, which was devastated by a fire in 1978.”²⁴ “Salvaged from the fire,” the organ pipes that had been stored in the basement were donated by the church to the sculptor. The catalogue for the exhibition was made up of photographs of black-painted sculpture on black paper—a dramatic restatement of the charred remains, recreated by the artist. This was a new and powerful version of rescuing trash and giving it new life. There were two sets of works: Cascades Perpendiculars and Silence Music. Both series made reference to the destroyed musical instrument, which added to their dark potency.²⁵

The Cascades Perpendicular series played off tall, vertical elements against a round wood disc, seemingly the end of an industrial spool.²⁶ Though Nevelson’s use of round shield-like discs on towering vertical forms goes back to the bride-and-groom columns in her 1959 Dawn’s Wedding Feast, the combination in the 1983 exhibit shows a formal confidence. Broken or whole, the discs provide a contrast to the vertical columns to which they are attached in surprising ways. On one, Cascades Perpendicular V, they gracefully mimic the curves of a female body, while appearing completely abstract.

The only extensive review of the Pace exhibition was in Art News, and the writer, Ruth Bass, had high praise for the artist. “Obviously Nevelson is still master of her medium, working with power, authority, refinement and grace.”²⁷ A comment in the Christian Science Monitor was brief and positive: Among “the season’s best shows [was] … Nevelson’s handsome show of sculpture.” The context was a boost for “our better older artists [who] make it clear that the ability to create lively and significant art is not limited to the very young.”²⁸ Yet the people who knew Nevelson up close realized that, though her energy level was still like that of a forty-year-old, she was aging.

At almost the same time as the Pace show, Nevelson was paired with Georgia O’Keeffe in an exhibition at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Nevelson and O’Keeffe: Independents of the Twentieth Century. The curator, Constance Schwartz, brought together the work of the two most celebrated women artists of the time under the conceit that they had remained staunchly apart from the isms and art movements surrounding them. Some writers found Nevelson and O’Keeffe to be an odd couple, given that they came from different generations and vastly different circumstances. “They are both tough old survivors with steely wills,” wrote Amei Wallach in Newsday, “and they both make beautiful art. That is about all they have in common.”²⁹

The Nevelson works were well selected, many from private collections and infrequently exhibited. The exhibit included a room full of large walls, including Homage to 6,000,000 I and Royal Tide II. Chosen with an eye for history, a number of excellent pieces from the mid-1950s were combined with a recent sculpture in Cor-Ten steel, Frozen Laces V.

The catalogue essay was written by Schwartz, a painter with a background in art history who, like Nevelson, had attended the Art Students League. Her text ends with the stirring words: “The work reflects a grandeur that mirrors the grandeur and majesty of the artist.”³⁰ Along with a packet of reviews of the exhibition, Schwartz sent Nevelson a note: “The crowds that have been pouring in to see this exhibition have been unreal and there does not seem to be any letup…. I want you to know that I think of you often and feel as if I have a running conversation with you when I closet myself with your work. I’ve given about twenty lectures on your work, and Wednesday afternoon there was nearly a riot here since there were so many people who wanted to hear me lecture that we had to do it twice … and next week the same thing.”³¹ Louise Nevelson’s renown and popularity was continuing—despite or maybe because of her age.

A few months later, on May 18, 1983, she was in New York City to receive the Gold Medal Award for Sculpture from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. On May 19 she was in Chicago for the installation and dedication of the enormous public sculpture, Dawn Shadows. The following day she was in Charleston, South Carolina, for the opening of her large retrospective show at the Gibbes Museum of Art, another signal honor since she was the first visiting visual artist to be invited to exhibit her work in the celebrated Spoleto Festival USA. Spoleto was one of the country’s premier performing-arts festivals, and the Gibbes Museum was the chief venue for visual arts in Charleston.

She described the hectic sequence of events to a Charleston reporter: “They have in New York a very distinguished award some hundred-odd years old…. So this year they gave one to me. That was on the 18th. Now I have to be in Chicago on the 19th. So what happened is that I took a few rags from my house, because I never waste time checking through airports …. So [then] I had to come over here from that trip. When we got here I didn’t even have time to do anything. I went over to see my show and then came here [the home of her hosts, John Philip and Llewellyn Kassebaum].”³² What is evident in her remarks is the artist’s delight at being able to report with apparent modesty that she was given a distinguished award in one city which in no way slowed down her hectic trajectory through two other cities, both of which were also honoring her.

The year 1983 was not quite over. Nevelson squeezed in two more big events in December: the publication of Jean Lipman’s book, Nevelson’s World, with an introduction by Hilton Kramer, and a long, lavishly illustrated photo essay on her home and studio in Architectural Digest.

First the book. Nevelson’s World was a “luxuriously produced” volume written by a woman who loved both the artist and her work.³³ Its 244 pages were vibrant, with Nevelson’s pithy quotations throughout and reproductions of more than a hundred and fifty of the artist’s best work from all periods. Lipman herself noted: “One of the things about Louise’s work—as soon as you get a very clear idea of what she’s doing, there is something exactly opposite.”³⁴

The introduction by Hilton Kramer defines Nevelson as “one of those artists who change the way we look at things.” The book “immerses the reader in Nevelson’s ‘universe’ and conveys the experience of her room-size wood sculpture more effectively than could be imagined,” said a Los Angeles Times reviewer.³⁵

Then, as a perfectly timed accompaniment to the book, which invites the reader into Nevelson’s world of art, in a lavishly illustrated cover article in its November issue 1983, Architectural Digest introduced the reader to the home and studio where Nevelson had lived and worked for twenty-five years. By the mid-1970s she had combined three houses of four and five stories into seventeen rooms with multiple kitchens, large spaces, marble stairways, and steps connecting the nine floors across multiple split levels. “I suppose it’s a bit of a luxury to live like this … but I find having space gives me the opportunity to keep creating.”³⁶ And creating was the most important thing in the world for this eighty-four-year-old woman. It always had been and would be until she died.

As always, Nevelson was engaged in many projects simultaneously—she called it jumping around. It helped her feel young and energetic even as she was very conscious of her age and aging. That awareness led her, on the one hand, to find safe harbors for some of her work and, on the other, to defy mortality by producing new art in new ways.

Also in 1983 Louise Nevelson started doing something she had wanted to do for years—decades really: design a set for a ballet or musical work. At age eighty-four, thanks to an off-hand remark passed from an art lover to an opera director, she finally got her chance. In the late 1970s, Richard Gaddes, then general director and founder of the Opera Theatre of St. Louis (OTSL) and former director of the Santa Fe Opera, was driving to Taos, New Mexico, with Robert Tobin, a Texas art collector and patron of the arts. Tobin said to Gaddes: “One of these days someone will ask Louise Nevelson to design an opera.”³⁷ Knowing how well Tobin knew opera, Gaddes responded: “Which one would you have her design?” Gluck’s Orfeo was the answer.³⁸ A few years later, Gaddes asked Nevelson to design the sets and costumes for Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. Every visual aspect of the work would be determined by Nevelson.

The OTSL was considered one of America’s most popular regional opera houses, and featured English-language productions staged by rising young singers and designers. In late 1982, Nevelson came to St. Louis to discuss the idea with Gaddes. By spring 1983, a contract was signed.

The most striking element of the production, and one of the few to survive, is the “Love Wall”—a twenty-foot-by-fifty-foot black wall, with a relief of gold geometric forms, which appears as the backdrop throughout the performance. It is made up of twelve panels, each containing four rectangles within which are shallow shadow boxes containing assorted gold geometric shapes. Characteristically complex and simple, playing with negative space, the Love Wall Nevelson designed enlivened the entire production. In the third act, befitting the sad dénouement, the two central panels were reversed to reveal black shapes on dark grey. The panels were reversed again when Amor reappears, leading to a happy ending. The curtain is now at the Chicago Opera Theater.

Other than the Love Wall, and the way it was lit, there were few other design elements in the set. As a result the production was simple and relatively easy to produce. The shimmering floor on which all the action occurred reflected both the curtain and the singers. The colors of the set and costumes of the main characters were predominantly black, gold, and silver.

Richard Gaddes recalled the experience of working with Nevelson, who had sixty years on most of the production’s cast and crew. Though Nevelson was far better known than the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, she never behaved like the star who had condescended to design for this little opera company. “Far from it, she threw herself into it. She was a member of the team, and she was a hoot.”³⁹ It was the first time since their opening season, eight years earlier, that the young company was working with a famous person. Gaddes continued, “It seemed to be a big moment in her life, and she loved it…. She was a wild card. She kept changing her mind, but she was lovely. She was a magnet of energy and fun, always getting up to something.”⁴⁰

In September 1983, Nevelson and Diana MacKown began to meet with Bill Katz, fine-arts consultant to Opera Theatre, and Willy Eisenhart, art writer and also an OTSL consultant, every Saturday in Nevelson’s studio. They gathered around a large black model of the theater and slowly built their conception of the opera. The core team worked together for nine months.⁴¹ Nevelson had created a family setting where everyone had an almost equal voice. The teamwork she loved and kept recreating was much like the one she and her sisters had established as children in the Berliawsky household, with Louise as the leader. This long-standing trait also explains why she and the many assistants with whom she worked over the years had such a good rapport. Whether they were household helpers, ceramists at the Clay Club, specialists in metal fabrication at Lippincott, or installers at museums and galleries, she treated them all as equals, but equals who were subservient to the larger goal of her creativity.

Nevelson called the whole experience of working with singers, dancers, stage directors, and lighting designers “a great delight of my life.”⁴² She and the director, Lou Galterio agreed on the importance of myth in the opera, and her ideas about the costume designs naturally fit with her ideas about art. A journalist observed cannily: “The costumes and jewelry seem to be extensions both of her art and of her own distinctive, and unusual, choices of dress for herself.”⁴³

Orfeo and Euridice was performed without intermission, and the opera lasted ninety minutes. The soloists, though good, were young and little known. “On opening night … [Nevelson] was given an exuberant, adoring standing ovation, which she acknowledged with the sort of graciousness and confidence that is exhibited by royal folks.”⁴⁴ According to the critic for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the fact that Louise Nevelson had designed the sets and costumes made Orfeo “the grandest accomplishment to date of the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.”⁴⁵

The Chicago Tribune reviewer decided that the Nevelson production would be considered “more an honorable sidelight than a landmark” in Nevelson’s career.⁴⁶ And it has been. The critic for New York’s Village Voice noted that the “boldness and barbaric pizzazz of Nevelson’s designs … nearly upstaged Gluck but wound up as an ally.”⁴⁷ John Rockwell, of The New York Times, was polite but rather dismissive: “The impact of [the set design] was interesting both conceptually and as another landmark in a distinguished artist’s career. As a theatrically effective representation of an already static opera, it was less successful.” He noted the dated quality to the designs, attributing it to the fact that Nevelson had “studied the performing arts in the 1920s, and her sensibility owes much to the world of modern dance between the world wars.”⁴⁸

In retrospect, the company’s director Richard Gaddes considers Orfeo “one of the most gratifying and rewarding moments” of his career. It was never again performed.⁴⁹ As Willy Eisenhart later described it, “It seems a perfect myth for her—the trials and triumphs of an artist.”⁵⁰

Ken Howard. Louise Nevelson at L’Orfeo at the Opera Theater of St. Louis, 1984. © Ken Howard / Opera Theatre of St. Louis

A little-known event that occurred on opening night was a typical Nevelson gesture. She had decided to give souvenirs to all the staff with whom she had worked so well. She arranged for someone to drive a truck over a large number of beer cans to flatten them. They were then painted gold on one side and black on the other, a piece of string was put through the hole in each and they became pendants to be worn by all, including herself, as part of the celebratory experience. Once again she made everyday objects—discards of civilization—into art, treasured by all who received them.⁵¹

Nevelson had discovered the beauty of crushed beer cans on a winter visit to St. Martin, where she was staying with Bill Katz. As they were taking a walk she came across a flattened can that had been left to rust on the street. Picking it up she turned to Katz and said, “Does Tiffany’s have anything as beautiful as this?” Enchanted with the beauty of the ordinary—especially the traumatized ordinary—Nevelson collected a number of discarded cans and placed them on her bedspread for study. Teeny Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp’s widow, who was also one of Katz’s guests, was celebrating her birthday, and Nevelson invited her to select one of the cans as a birthday gift. Duchamp readily went along with the plan, having been educated by her husband to seek the miraculous and beautiful in the commonplace.⁵²

Nevelson had worked most closely with the costume staff of the St. Louis Opera Theatre. They liked her so much that they found a unique way to honor her. On each of the six nights of the production, a member of the costume shop would create and wear a hybrid outfit combining a typical Nevelson assemblage of fabrics and headgear with some part of one of the singer’s costumes, thus merging an operatic character with an ersatz version of the artist. Adding, of course, eyelashes made of black construction paper. On closing night there were eight faux Louise Nevelsons wandering through the crowds. She thought it was hilarious.

Nevelson was invited to dinner one evening at the home of one of St. Louis’s patrons of the arts. David Zinman, a conductor working with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, was also there. Arriving a little bit late, Richard Gaddes walked in with Eleanor Steber, one of America’s leading sopranos. Steber had performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for twenty years and was a favorite on radio and television for singing popular music. Seeing Steber walk into the room, Zinman rushed to the piano and started to play the music for the aria “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca. Steber threw her coat onto a chair and, right on cue, sang the entire piece (magnificently) to Louise Nevelson, who was “blown away” by the unexpected and fitting tribute.⁵³

“Vissi d’arte” is one of the most famous arias in opera history. Tosca, the soprano of Puccini’s masterpiece, sings the haunting line, “I lived for my art. I lived for love. I never harmed a living soul,” as she contemplates her helplessness at the hands of the evil Baron Scarpia. It is one of the supreme musical paeans to a life in art. “Two superstars meeting like this, and literally the music began within seconds of Steber’s walking in the door.”⁵⁴ That the aging, celebrated Steber would honor the aging, celebrated Nevelson in such a spontaneous manner was extraordinary. The event made for one of the greatest moments of Gaddes’s career.⁵⁵

In 1983 and 1984 Nevelson was producing another large sculpture (twenty-one feet high by twenty-three feet wide by fourteen feet), which had the working title Sky Gesture.

During the installation at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, when she saw the sculpture placed prominently—at the top of a ridge that she poetically called a high mountain—in the two-hundred-acre park in front of the museum building, she decided to rename it City on the High Mountain. She had started on two separate compositions, and after several months she combined them.⁵⁶ And perhaps the “city” she was referring to was New York, since the smaller of the two compositions in the work was a version of the largest piece in her sculpture group for Shadows and Flags at the Nevelson Plaza in downtown Manhattan. A careful study of the finished work allows us to see how she constructed City on the High Mountain in part out of this previous work. Shadows and Flags was remade in a smaller size with some of its original parts deleted and placed alongside the larger more complex section of the sculpture with continuing revisions until the artist was satisfied that the two sections worked together as a blended whole. The two up-thrusting rectangular columns at the base of the old section combine in their new placement to make a syncopated ladder of squared-off elements that reach to the top of the sculpture where they finally meet up with the ball of spikes—its curvilinear frame that stops them in their tracks. She had made the ball of railway spikes ten years earlier. “The ultimate end was when I put that there, I said, ‘Finis.’ Sometimes it’s only a period that finishes a sentence, and that was the period that finished that sentence.”⁵⁷

The steel “lace” form in the center was actually a skeleton frame Lippincott and his men found for the artist at the Schiavone scrap-metal yard in North Haven. It was a leftover from an industrial job—a panel of negative spaces left by objects that had been mechanically punched out, fitted close together for economy. Nevelson named these leftover elements “lace” and when she added them to a sculpture she called it “warming up the piece.”⁵⁸

Not only does the addition of the “lace” cover the previously gaping hole at the heart of the piece, by adding two curved slats framing the “lace” she tied the whole work together, with the steel cutouts becoming the cohesive circular heart at the center of the work. The ball of rivets she added to the top at the end is a perfect echo of the lacy heart. The rounded form that she also added on the right-hand column complicates and confirms the balanced play of curvilinear and straight or sharp-edged elements that make up the whole. No wonder it was one of her favorite sculptures, part of what she called her “lace group.”⁵⁹

In 1985 Nevelson was eighty-four years old. And she was still getting up at six in the morning, working sometimes three days straight, and explaining to anyone who asked: “Art is a high. Like a runaway car, once you’re in it you can’t stop.”⁶⁰ By the end of the year she had been in six group exhibitions, four solo shows, completed two huge Cor-Ten steel sculptures, and had one of them, City on the High Mountain, installed at a major public sculpture garden.

Summer was always a busy time for Nevelson. The warm weather suited her, and she continued to tend to her double life. Her work came first and her career—promoting herself and her art through shows, interviews, and carefully selected social events—came second. She could now easily afford whatever help she needed (every serious sculptor needs help). And she could use whatever material interested her. She had all the space she needed, whenever she needed it. The freedom to make the art she wanted, exactly the way she wanted to make it, was a gift of her later years. As Arne Glimcher observed: “She had a good old age.”⁶¹

Late February 1985 saw yet another Nevelson exhibition at Pace Gallery. This time, Nevelson and Glimcher went with transparency, advertising the show as Louise Nevelson at 85. If people were going to keep writing about her advancing years, she would show the world that she never ever acted like an old lady and wasn’t afraid to let her age be known. About this exhibit, John Russell wrote in The New York Times:

To anyone who thinks of Louise Nevelson’s black reliefs as tenebrous, densely crafted and somewhat Gothic in their overtones, her new show at the Pace Gallery will be full of surprises. Black they still are, but the look of the sunken cathedral is quite gone. In its place, vigorous mechanistic forms are espaliered on a bone-white wall. Light flows in and out where once it took a bath in black dust…. Where once verticality reigned, long lean shapes are aligned with a diagonal thrust that threatens to blast off through the ceiling … these new-style reliefs, which for an artist who has just turned 85 are truly an astonishing achievement.⁶²

Russell is describing the first works from the Mirror Shadow series, which were indeed an astonishing breakthrough—not just in quantity but in originality. In the first of the series, Mirror Shadow I, she extended the elements beyond the grid horizontally and even a bit vertically. By the time she arrived at the second of the series, Mirror Shadow II, elements that had remained on neatly horizontal and vertical axes had been thrown completely off kilter, shooting out into rollicking diagonal directions.

Mirror Shadow II, 1985. Painted wood, 115 × 141 × 21 in. Private collection. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery

Her humor and intelligence on display as usual throughout the series, it seemed as though Nevelson was making fun of her old friend the grid, which she incorporated into the works in surprising ways. It could appear coyly as a background prop in Mirror Shadow II, or it could suddenly play an intermediate role as in Mirror Shadow XVI, where two grids clearly stand out. One is more transparent than the other, and both contrast in almost every way with the flat circular cutouts all leaning leftwards. The weight of the diagonally oriented elements in front of and behind the two grids is held in balance by the grids’ calming stability.

Never satisfied to set off boldly in only one new direction at a time, in 1985 Nevelson also created two remarkable sets of work: Volcanic Magic collages and a series of “mixed-media polychrome” wall pieces.

Most of the collages from the Volcanic Magic series were completed in 1985. The wood, metal, and paper elements she used were unpainted, and their startling combinations made them the most powerful collage works she had ever done. These new works were literal explosions of wit, grace, and power. She worked without inhibition, free to combine the most incongruous elements—paper, wood, all kinds of wood scraps, cut pieces of plywood, torn pieces of balsa wood, cardboard, chair backs, chair fronts, metal hinges, table tops and table bottoms, and many battered picture frames. The assemblages were enhanced by the colors of the diverse parts. It was as though she had rediscovered a new way to make a dynamic conflict of light and shadow without restricting herself to monochrome. We see in them not only Nevelson’s familiar play with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal axes, but the to and fro of circular forms with straight-edged shapes. We also see her wit—as in Volcanic Magic XX, in which a raggedy plywood pedestrian takes off behind the chair on which he appears just to have been sitting—and her unconventionality in a work called Untitled (1985), which includes a broom and dustpan.

Nevelson’s return to color after decades of avoiding it may have been an echo of her early years in art class with Lena Cleveland, or her even earlier years in the home of her maternal grandmother, whose colorful dyes she recalled as one of her first memories. What was behind the outburst of new and wonderful work—breakthroughs and new directions, astonishing output, ease of work, everything going right in the studio? Was she going far back in her life because she knew it was coming to an end? Had the sense of her forthcoming death released the need to go forward as fast as she could?

Perhaps being in her eighty-fifth year, perhaps being honored once again in Rockland, Maine, with a big exhibition planned for September 1985, perhaps knowing that she would receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard in June, but mostly, perhaps, accepting the fact that she could not go on forever, Nevelson began to take care of her legacy. On March 18 a prominent article in The New York Times announced that “Louise Nevelson [was] Giving 25 Works to Museums.” The artist explained herself: “At 85 I feel fine, but you begin to think of what you have and what you want to do…. While I’m here, it fulfills some awareness of my being to know that these things will have a home and will be taken care of. That’s a great feeling.”⁶³

Thirteen years earlier Nevelson had said: “I don’t get attached to my work. I’m happy to get rid of it so other people can relate to it. I’ve given a lot away. I’m not much of a Bible reader, but that part about casting bread on the water and it will be returned twofold. That is true. It has happened to me many times. I make a statement by giving my work.”⁶⁴ Indeed, Nevelson had been giving her work, either directly or via her family, to museums for over twenty-five years. That her work was on exhibit in major American museums, like the MoMA in New York, had helped make her reputation—more than a twofold return.

The most important of the gifts Nevelson made that year was Mrs. N’s Palace, which she gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After it was initially exhibited at Pace Gallery in 1977, “a museum in Germany offered to buy the work for $1 million, but Miss Nevelson declined, wishing to keep the work in the United States.”⁶⁵ William Lieberman, curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Met, declared: “It’s the best thing she ever did.” It’s both a sculpture and an environment and as such it was also a representation of home for the artist, which lends added significance to her desire that the work remain in the United States.

The other museums Nevelson chose were places she had shown with success and places for which she “felt sympathetic.” She gave to the Cooper Union, the prestigious art school in New York. Bill Lacy, the president of the school, commented: “Her work has had a great influence on artists and architects and all kinds of designers…. She pretty much sticks to one color, black or white, but she feels that there are unlimited choices within that framework and has devoted a life to exploring them. She’s shown them to be limitless, if you have that kind of imagination and genius.”⁶⁶

Nevelson gave the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) six sculptures and five mixed-media collages. When she was in Los Angeles a few months later for the unveiling of her sculpture Night Sail, she explained: “Through these years there were a few people that somehow have supported me. I stuck it out through thick and thin and have never forgotten them. These are the people I wanted to return to. Some of them are the top men in art now.”⁶⁷ She was referring to MoCA director Richard Koshalek, who had been a curator at the Walker Art Institute, where she had met him in in preparation for her 1973 exhibit. She was also recalling the many collectors in Los Angeles who had supported her work through the years.

“I have my own way of looking at things,” she told an interviewer about her gifts to the museums. “It’s a great feeling that these pieces will go to good places and be cared for. Why should I wait till I croak? And they’ll be seen.” Nevelson’s lifelong wish was that her work would be out in the world and visible. At the same time, however, she was also denying that her legacy mattered to her at all. “I don’t give a damn [how I am regarded in the future]. I don’t care about art history. It would intrude on my work, on what I do, I don’t care what he thinks or what she thinks—I haven’t got time for that.”⁶⁸

Of course she cared about what others thought. Every artist does. But through many decades of neglect Nevelson had had to develop thick skin. “It makes you very independent—you have to be with this kind of work. I don’t say it’s been an easy road; it hasn’t. I work day and night with it, and all the other things fall by the wayside.” Musing on what might have happened had she been born a man, “In the past 25 years I have done four thousand collages alone. And they’re only beginning to sell now…. If I were a male, I would be in a different place. I’m in a good place now, but I’d be in a different [that is, a better] place.”⁶⁹ Nevelson was acutely aware that giving away so much of her art reflected her generosity and enormous productivity. But she also knew of the possible downside of her gifts to museums. Women artists sometimes had to resort to giving just to get their work into a prestigious museum collection. As a consequence, the gifts were often not as highly valued as works by male artists that required substantial outlays of the museum’s budget. If something had been paid for, it was justifiable to keep it on exhibit so it could earn its keep.

In addition to her gifts to the museums, in 1985 and 1986 she notarized gift agreements giving Diana MacKown sculptures, paintings, and collages. Most of the sculpture she gave Diana was from a period in which Arne Glimcher had little interest—the terra-cottas from the mid-1930s, late 1940s, and early 1950s. In the legal agreements, Nevelson gave Diana MacKown permission to cast and reproduce these works in editions, significantly adding to their potential market value.⁷⁰ Nevelson was sure that would suffice to take care of Diana’s future economic needs.

For over twenty years both MacKown and Glimcher had been doing everything in their power to assist Nevelson in her work, career, and life. They respected and loved her, and Nevelson treated them as her son and daughter. Knowing that Arne Glimcher needed no financial help from her after she died, she chose to leave her estate to her son Mike. Her guilt for her double abandonment of him was persistent, and she was also aware that Mike had been left nothing by his father. She had left him when he was nine years old by going to Germany to study with Hans Hofmann. She left him again after their closeness in the early 1960s during the crisis of the Janis-Kurzman fiasco. Once she was back on her feet she relied on Glimcher, MacKown, and her art-world friends for closeness. The first abandonment was pointedly geographical, the second was perhaps more devastating coming after their unaccustomed familial intimacy.

In the mid-1970s she had made Mike her only heir and given him as much money as she could. (“I’ve made sure that my son doesn’t have to work,” she told a reporter from The Washington Post in 1985, “I don’t believe in it, it’s slavery.”⁷¹) Mike had been among the family members supporting Nevelson during the thirty years before she was able to support herself as an artist, sending her money from the mid-1940s, when he was a Merchant Marine, to the late 1950s. He was following in his uncle Nate’s footsteps, trying to keep his mother safely housed, fed, and clothed. The reversal of fortune—with Louise Nevelson sending her son weekly checks—only began in the 1960s, when she had a stable income from her work.

Knowing that he still might never forgive her for abandoning him when he was a child, Nevelson had gone along with his plan to set up a shell corporation, Sculptotek, with himself as the CEO and with her and Diana as employees. It was designed to be a tax shelter so that after her death he would not have to pay huge amounts to the IRS for money earned from her estate. By 1976 Mike, with the help of his lawyer, set up Sculptotek, which was to be managed by them both. MacKown recalls, “I didn’t pay too much attention to any of it. Neither did Louise. It was just there, it was presented as a tax thing, and that’s how it was done.”⁷² Many artists’ families were doing similar maneuvers in those years to avoid sizable estate taxes, but they didn’t always get caught. The IRS ultimately sued Mike successfully. At the same time both Glimcher and MacKown distrusted Mike. MacKown tried explaining to Louise Nevelson that, despite the artist’s best hopes that she and Mike could work together to maintain and build Nevelson’s legacy after her death, no such thing was likely. Nevelson’s conflicted feelings about her son and her guilt about having been a “bad mother” made it very difficult for her to see how much at odds with Diana MacKown he was and would be after she died. Mike saw Diana as one of the chief people who had kept him at a distance from his mother. Too many times she had not let his mother talk on the phone to her son, saying “Louise is busy,” acting as the guardian at the gate—protecting the artist from interruptions and intrusions on her valuable time. Unfortunately, MacKown could not have been more correct about the impossibility of their working together.

On April 23, 1985, at a luncheon at the White House, President Ronald Reagan bestowed on Louise Nevelson and eleven other individuals the National Medal of Arts, a significant honor. Nevelson and O’Keeffe were the only two visual artists honored. Nevelson was described as the “originator of environmental sculpture, who assembles bits of material in what she calls a ‘unified whole.’ ”⁷³ Nancy Reagan pronounced Nevelson to be “one of a handful of truly original and major artists in America.”⁷⁴

Ironically, just as Reagan was declaring, “No one realizes the importance of freedom more than the artist…. Where there is liberty, art succeeds,”⁷⁵ Nevelson had been planning to publically protest the president’s plan to lay a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, where many members of Hitler’s SS are buried. But the night before the ceremony, she decided against it. Elie Wiesel had criticized the president on that subject a few days earlier when he received the Congressional Gold medal in the Oval Office. She noted: “The event tomorrow is a celebration. I wouldn’t want to break that mood…. But if something isn’t done to correct it, I won’t hesitate to make a statement.”⁷⁶ She may not have spoken up about Reagan’s tone-deaf “plan to honor Nazi dead,” as Nevelson saw it, but she couldn’t resist saying something about his plan to cut funding for the arts.

Looking her usual regal self “in flowing robes and silver jewelry,” she was the only honoree to register a complaint about the administration’s proposed budget cuts of eleven percent for the arts. Nevelson said “We can’t have cuts…. Not when the dollar is worth a quarter.”⁷⁷ Though she appreciated the honor he bestowed on her, it did not make her less outspoken about the slight his administration was giving to creativity.

Six weeks later on June 6, during the 1985 commencement at Harvard College, Louise Nevelson received an honorary degree. She was the only woman among ten individuals to be so honored. That this occurred at all is a complicated story involving the artist’s actual accomplishments, the fact everyone knew her time was limited, her dealer’s grand gift to the university and, finally, the value of having a tight-knit clan of Harvard alumni on her side.

Arne Glimcher’s son, Marc Glimcher, was graduating from Harvard College that June, as was James Solomon, the son of Richard Solomon, president of Pace Prints and Arne Glimcher’s best friend. To honor that event—and also to commemorate the graduation of Glimcher’s father-in-law, Sumner Cooper, in the class of 1934—Arne Glimcher donated Nevelson’s Night Wall I to the college.

The first inkling of the possible gift to Harvard of a Nevelson sculpture came in an exquisitely tactful letter in October 1982. Richard Solomon (who had also graduated from Harvard, with the class of 1956) wrote to the college president, Derek Bok. “My question,” Solomon wrote, “is whether Harvard would have an interest in receiving a gift of this nature.” It took a year for Glimcher, Nevelson, and Bok to come to agreement that the gift of a large (envisioned to be a twenty-foot-long outdoor sculpture) would indeed be a welcome addition to the university.

By December 1984 a maquette of Night Wall I had arrived and “won much approbation and inspired enthusiasm.” But then began, as Harvard art historian John Rosenfield explained, “the search for a suitable site and a procedure for decision-making…. The decision of where to place the sculpture will pass before many people of varying tastes and background before we can submit it to the President. Nonetheless, the piece is so fine and the project so worthwhile that we feel that—with patience and the long view—we will work this out successfully.”⁷⁸

Arne Glimcher was not pleased with the idea of a “long view,” since he wanted the sculpture to be in place in time for his son’s graduation. The site finally selected was in a glade of oak trees at the northern end of the Harvard Law School Quadrangle, between Langdell Hall and Harkness Commons.⁷⁹

The dedication ceremony on June 3, 1985, went off without a hitch, and Nevelson stayed in town for another two days to be present at the graduation of Marc Glimcher and James Solomon and also to receive her honorary degree. Harvard’s President Bok declared: “Her creative spirit has transformed the fragments of a familiar world into sculptured wholes, surprising, beguiling, demanding our visual appreciation.”⁸⁰

Two weeks later, on Thursday evening June 20, 1985, one of her monumental aluminum-and-steel sculptures was dedicated at the Crocker Center in downtown Los Angeles, opposite the new Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue, to which she had just made a substantial gift. Mayor Tom Bradley declared it Louise Nevelson Day, in honor of “a sculpture inspired by the sweeping vistas of Los Angeles and the sea that borders the city.”⁸¹ After the unveiling, at a reception,⁸² Nevelson told reporters, “I’m a woman of great action. I don’t sit down and dream, I’d rather move a mountain.” One journalist noted that, given the massive size of the thirty-foot-tall, thirty-three-ton Night Sail, Nevelson had “indeed brought a mountain to Los Angeles.”⁸³

In a prime position between the IBM Tower and the main block of the Crocker Center, Nevelson’s tall, narrow sculpture presents dazzlingly different views to passing pedestrians, its complexity only unfolding if one walks all the way around the work. Nevelson had explained to reporters that when she had first seen the site, she had been impressed by “the luxury of space, something we New Yorkers don’t have.” She had looked off over Grand Street and seen, as the reporter of the Los Angeles Times remarked, “a limitless vista well suited to a sculpture that would have a floating quality of movement …. [gliding] silently through space … vaguely [alluding] to sails and riggings.”⁸⁴

When seen from the narrow back or front, the tallest element, a sinuous snake- or flame-like element,⁸⁵ towers high above the rest of the sculpture, stamping its silhouette against the sky. When viewed from the much wider side view, this element disappears and the sail shapes dominate. One large square-rigged element is transparent; its multi-angled grids bisected by what must represent a mast. There is a cutout wedge shape echoing the taller, solid second sail at the other end of the narrow double-rigged boat. Within each of the larger pieces is a lively counterpoint of curves and straight edges. From the two side views, the airy interactions weave harmoniously as the wind whipping the sail of a fast-moving schooner. Yet it is as stolidly stable from front to back as any Nile barge carrying Cleopatra and her treasures.

After the installation, sitting alone on a bench with a glass of wine, Nevelson looked at the sculpture, and said: “It holds its own, but it’s not too aggressive…. You get a little jaded. I’m fortunate in my life because I never thought I was too bright. It saved me in a certain way. I am still fresh. Something that you never thought was your strength may serve you best. I’m as pleased as I have been. This sculpture has a grace. Instead of being a Beethoven, it’s a Mozart.”⁸⁶

Nevelson went back to Rockland for three days in September 1985, celebrating her eighty-sixth birthday.

In Rockland she appeared at one event, “swathed in layers of black—a large head scarf, a loose fitting jacket, a dress and a pair of silky black pants that bore a suspicious resemblance to lingerie…. Nevelson could have passed for a high-class bag lady. But at the same time the effect was extravagantly glamorous, the look of someone who had little patience with convention, whether it came to designing sculpture or getting dressed in the morning.”⁸⁷

Large crowds greeted her for the opening of The Gifts: 1985, her three-month-long exhibit in the Farnsworth Museum’s Craig Gallery, which inaugurated a fund drive to create the Nevelson-Berliawsky Gallery. The show had been three years in the planning and included works given to the museum by the artist and her family as well as two new collages, two dozen pieces of hand-crafted jewelry, large swatches of fabric used to design the costumes for Orfeo, and the two thrones from the set.⁸⁸ (The thrones had originally been painted black, but Nevelson had them covered with gold leaf for the Farnsworth.⁸⁹) Her sister Anita and her sister-in-law Lillian were part of the celebration. At the champagne reception Nevelson wore a flowing black and gold outfit. In her honor, museum patrons were dressed in the artist’s colors—black, white, and gold, as had been requested on the invitation. A gold harp was played during the reception by a local musician.⁹⁰

Nevelson had defied Arne Glimcher by insisting, over his objections, that she should give yet more work—and good quality work—to the Farnsworth Museum on the occasion of her second large exhibition. (Glimcher was aware of the many slights she had received in Rockland during her childhood.) Louise Nevelson’s return to Rockland in her mid-eighties and her generosity to the Farnsworth, the Colby Museum of Art, Skowhegan, and Westbrook College—all Maine institutions—were signs that she wanted to forget and forgive and make peace with the past. But it was a mask, and a mask that sometimes slipped.

When she had learned that Andrew Wyeth was planning to visit her 1979 exhibition, she was thrilled beyond expectation. Maurice Péladeau’s wife, Millie, saw this as an indication of the artist’s humility. But I think rather her excitement expressed her amazement that she or anyone originally named Berliawsky would ever be fully accepted in Rockland or by one of the first families of the state. No matter how many times she had dined at the White House in Washington, D.C., she probably never believed that she could “make it” in Maine.

After the 1985 exhibit and celebratory events were over, Nevelson observed: “When I was growing up in Rockland from grammar school to high school, there was no museum…. One of the great joys of my life is that we have a first-rate one now, a beautiful building that encloses creative works that can stand with great ones. That is something that I had not expected in my wildest dreams to find in a town in Maine, that jewel that shines.”⁹¹

As 1985 was winding down, in a lengthy interview published in the Washington Post, Nevelson described her thoughts on life and art. Not very different from things she had said earlier but sharper and more clear.⁹² Finally, when the reporter asked if the years had taken a toll on her physical powers she responded: “I think so, but then it gave me something. It’s a balance. You pay a price for everything. And … I’ve learned to take care of things with such economy that I can claim much of my time. I don’t go to beauty parlors. I don’t do many things. They take time away from the other more important things in my life. My work.”

And so ended 1985.